Making this film some 14 years after Tom Jones (1963), Tony Richardson was persuaded to hire Hugh Griffith, who had scored a great personal success (and an Oscar nomination) in the earlier film, to play a brief cameo. In the intervening years, however, Griffith's legendary fondness for alcohol had degenerated into a chronic condition which would kill him in 1980, and Richardson was, he later wrote, shocked by his appearance and condition. Without alcohol, Griffith could not perform at all; but if he had even a small amount, he became incoherent, slurred and unpredictable. Compromising, Richardson fed him a tablespoon of brandy before each take, which he estimated was just about as much as Griffith could safely take.
This movie was an unrelated follow-up to the Academy Award Best Picture Winning movie Tom Jones (1963). This movie, another bawdy period comedy, had the same director, Tony Richardson, and other common cast and crew, and was also based on a novel by Henry Fielding. Fielding wrote the book seven years before he wrote "Tom Jones".
The full title of this movie's source novel by Henry Fielding is "Joseph Andrews, or The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams". This movie was released two hundred thirty-five years after the novel was published. The novel was published in two volumes, Fielding describing the work as a "comic epic poem in prose".